Thursday, July 14, 2011

Creating your own MessageBox in Silverlight

The MessageBox built into Silverlight is nice enough to use for simple OK, Cancel scenarios, but sometimes I want to change the text of the buttons in the MessageBox. For example, I may want Yes, No instead of OK, Cancel or maybe completely different text like Finished Now, Finish Later. The syntax of the MessageBox is simple enough so I decided to mirror it as closely as I could. This makes it as painless as possible to change from a MessageBox to my message box. The biggest difference in usage that I couldn’t figure out how to get around is that the MessageBox is a blocking call, but the UI thread still continues to render. When I tried to do the same, the UI thread did not continue to render. I looked at the code for MessageBox and it appears to be calling a Windows native MessageBox that is most likely different for OS that Silverlight is implemented on. So, I decided that in the Silverlight manor I would use asynchronous calls (event handlers) instead of a blocking call. When I use delegates the code is similar to using MessageBox.

Okay, enough description I think. Here is source code for my version of MessageBox called MessageBox2

Download Source Code for Control

Usage

You’ll notice I have 3 Show() methods instead of the standard 2 that MessageBox has. The reason is that I added one so that you can specify the text of OK and Cancel buttons. You’ll notice that I don’t return a MessageBoxResult and instead return the MessageBox itself. Below is how you would use the MessageBox versus MessageBox2.